We’ve all come across them before: those little bags of small balls that come packed together with new shoes or electrical goods. The balls are there to absorb moisture so as to protect the items from damage. “These materials act like a sponge,” explains physicist Professor Rustem Valiullin from Leipzig University. He and his research group have found a way to more precisely determine the properties of these materials, because they can better account for the underlying disorder. Their article has been designated “ACS Editors’ Choice” by the editors of the American Chemical Society journals, who recognize the “importance to the global scientific community” of the Leipzig researchers’ work and see it as a breakthrough in the accurate description of phase transition phenomena in disordered porous materials.
Click here for original story, ‘We marry disorder with order’: The effects of geometrical disorder on fluids and solids in mesoporous materials
Source: Phys.org